The church is in a bad state.
I don’t mean our little parish church in particular (which is frankly doing rather well) but the church as a whole - in Sydney and even worldwide.
And I don’t think it’s because we don’t have the answers. I am an Evangelical. I believe that Jesus is the answer - I truly do, but at the risk of sounding like a smart-alec I want to suggest that the problem may be in the questions we ask, rather than in the answer as such.
I remember one fellow-parishioner here asking me a while back, what did I think could be done to turn our Diocese around from the path of self-destruction that it is currently walking with seemingly gay abandon (pun intended, but I‘ll return to that later)
I thought on this for some time but I decided eventually that the answer was really extremely straightforward. Just get the Archbishop to move into The Block in Redfern (probably the closest thing we have to a ’ghetto’ area in our city). I think that would change everything, and that quite possibly we would see a whole new approach to doing church within a year or so.
Why would this make such a difference? Are there any special truths hidden within the streets of indigenous Redfern? Not so far as I know, but living in that environment forces you to ask a whole different series of questions to the questions you ask when you’re residing in the Eastern suburbs and spending your days locked in an office inside corporation headquarters.
It’s the questions we ask that determine the answers we get, and the Bible is full of examples of persons asking God all the wrong sorts of questions:
Am I my brothers keeper?
Who is my neighbour?
And then there’s this one that we get today in John 9: “Why was this man born blind? Was it his sin or the sin of his parents?”
It’s an interesting question. It would make for a good theological paper. It’s the sort of question that religious people love to discuss, but as Jesus’ response makes clear, so far as He is concerned, it was the wrong question.
Why do we ask these sorts of questions? Sometimes I suppose it’s just idle curiosity. More often, I suspect, it’s because we want an excuse for not feeling responsible.
A guy came to my door yesterday morning asking for food and particularly asking for sugar, and of course I was tempted to ask, “what did you do with your money? Why don’t you have enough to buy your own food?”
Of course it wouldn’t be a serious question, in so far as I already knew the answer, both from his appearance and from his request for sugar. Obviously he has an addiction, but it’s tempting to ask anyway, so that I can excuse myself from responsibility, or at least feel morally superior as I do give him a handout (thankfully, I do manage to resist asking such questions nowadays).
Sometimes we ask questions of God because we’re curious. Sometimes we ask questions to excuse ourselves of responsibility. A lot of the time, I think, we ask questions because we feel insecure.
I think of all the questioning that went on in the US (and that still goes on) about why the Twin Towers were attacked? No one would deny of course that this was a tragedy that needed to be thoroughly investigated, but the questioning that followed, from US citizens in particular, revealed something deeper, I believe - a sudden sense of insecurity such that we are no longer as safe as we thought we were.
It’s interesting when you think realistically about the human cost of ‘9/11’. It was terrible, I would not want to deny that at all, but compared to what has been going on in Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine, a death toll like 9/11 would be a good day in a lot of those places.
The pain of 9/11 for most Americans, so far as I can see, was not simply the cost of human life as such, but the fact that ’if it could happen to them, what’s to stop it happening to me?’
We ask questions for different reasons - some good and some bad. What was behind the question the disciples put to Jesus that we read of in John chapter 9 - “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
Were the disciples just curious, looking for a solid theological chestnut to chew over with their master as they strolled along? Were they looking for a justification so as to excuse themselves from having throw any coins in his direction? Or did this guy’s very appearance make them feel insecure?
Since this man was born blind, it’s hard to work out how it could have been his fault, but surely it has to be somebody’s fault, because if it’s nobody’s fault, then what’s to stop something equally tragic happening to me?
We can’t really get inside the mind of the disciples, and so we can’t fully know what drove them to ask the question, but what we do know, from Jesus’ response, is that it was the wrong question.
Jesus’ response to the disciples’ question is somewhat shocking if you take it as a straightforward theological pronouncement: "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
Jesus tells them, so it seems, that the reason the man has been handicapped all his life was so that they’d have the opportunity to do something for him, and if you take this literally, the philosophical implications are a little disturbing. Moreover though, if you get caught up in theological discussion about Jesus’ response, I think you actually run the risk of missing the whole point, which is that the appearance of this man in their lives should have been taken as an opportunity for action rather than one for reflection.
I think that this is actually the whole point of Jesus’ response. The disciples ask a theoretical question. Jesus gives them an existential answer. They look for an explanation. Jesus shows them an opportunity. They see a problem that needs solving. Jesus sees a human being who needs help.
As I say, we ask these sorts of questions for a variety of reasons, and often it’s in order to avoid action, but Jesus gives his people no option. This is not a theological chestnut that deserves to be mulled over. It’s a human being in need of help. And so He adds: "We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world."
And again we could retreat into a theological discussion here about what it means for Jesus to be the ‘light of the world’, but the answer is not to be found in speculative reflection. but in the very tangible healing of this man!
In some ways I see the whole division in this story as being between the good religious people, who are trying to do what good religious people do best - namely, theologise and discuss things - and Jesus, on the other hand, who gets His hands dirty and actually helps the man!
And it’s fascinating, in this regard, how dirty Jesus’ hands actually get, as we‘re given all the gritty details. He spits on the ground, He makes mud with his fingers from the dirt and spit, and then he rubs the concoction on the blind guy’s eyes! It’s all very tangible and earthy (in the literal sense of the word), and while all this hands-on action is taking place, what are the disciples doing? They are standing back having a theological discussion about it all!
And the divide continues to widen as the story develops further, as all the other good religious people in town begin to get involved, and what do they want to do - join in the celebration of the blind guy’s healing? No! They want to join the discussion over the theological implications of what’s taken place!
And so what starts out with the disciples asking Jesus ‘what’s the problem with this guy’, and Jesus saying, ‘I don’t see a problem but an opportunity’, concludes with the religious leaders asking, ‘what exactly took place here?’ and the blind guy saying, ‘I don’t know. I don’t pretend to understand the theology of it. All I know is that I used to be blind but now I see! It’s all good!’
Unfortunately, of course, it doesn’t turn out to be all good because these armchair theologians manage to spoil it all, and the poor used-to-be-blind guy ends up being excommunicated from his community.
It’s almost impossible to believe that any group of people could get so caught up in their own theological correctness that they could somehow fail to see the Spirit of God blowing through their midst in such a powerful and obvious way! Surely such a thing could never happen again! Surely!
Last night, as most of you know, I marched in the Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras. I did that not because I am gay or lesbian. I marched as a part of a contingent that wanted to say ‘sorry’ to those in the gay and lesbian community who have been sidelined and/or abused by the church, and there are many. The church has much, I believe, to say ‘sorry’ for.
But not many of my clerical peers were there - certainly not many from the Sydney Anglican community, but frankly not many from amongst the Christian clergy at large in this city. The group was called, ‘100 Revs’ but unfortunately we couldn’t muster anywhere near 100.
And I can understand why. The whole event raises so many questions, and plenty of those questions occurred to me too, and if I had focused on those questions I would have been able to give myself some very solid excuses for not going. But I think that I did end up asking what was the only appropriate question for the night - namely, "where do you want me to stand in the march?"
Jesus is the answer. I believe that. And Jesus has the answers, I believe, to all the problems we see around us and all the problems that are destroying our world. But in order to hear the answers, we need to ask the right questions!
Why don’t I have more money?
How can I look ten years younger?
Who is to blame for all the bad things we see going on around us?
These are the wrong questions. Even perhaps the question our church most likes to answer, namely, ‘How do I secure and eternal future for myself?’ is, I suspect, for the most part, the wrong question.
The church today is in a bad state. And if we’re going to start to get things right, we must stop trying to give answers to questions nobody is asking, and we must begin to ask the right questions of Jesus ourselves:
* How do I love you more?
* What do you want me to do?
* Where should I get started?
